We arrived at the Rock this past Saturday Morning around 5:45am. We were well on our way to the island by 6:15.
We stopped and fished a few shorelines and coves, but our main objective was to reach the island and fish all around it. The first hour was pretty dead with only sunnies nibbling at our baits. We were tossing 4’ Keitech swim impacts in light to dark silver with glitter. After starting to get annoyed with the smell of skunk, we switched to a pumpkinseed Keitech sexy impact. BOOM!! My buddy landed a fish and I joined with a double header on the first cast with pumpkin seed. My Personal Best Crappie to date. Maybe you boys have secret lakes where they get bigger, but these things were biggest ive seen with my two eyes. Ha! We picked off the occasional dink bass / pickerel or panfish on the way to the island. We arrived and entered the skinny side and started nailing pickerel and crappie. We reached the mouth and we caught a few nice Smallies. The bigger one I’m holding was 2.3lbs on the digital scale. I surely thought it was bigger by way it fought. For a second I thought it might have been one of them Hybrids they stocked. The action slowed down so we changed over to a Silvery Keitech swim impact with blue top and blue glitter. This seemed to get the bite going again. The sunnies there are very aggressive as we kept losing tails on baits and hooking some on. We had 1/0 and 3/0 hooks and these guys were still managing to get on. Crazy!! My Buddy also picked up with PB crappie on one of the feeder coves.
On the way back we caught a few more as the rains started coming down. We called it quit by noon. Final count 11 fish me and my buddy taking the tie breaker at the end with another aggressive gill on a 4’ worm.
What a great place the Rock is. That was only my second time there and only my first time really fishing it. With the exception of the cat fish and the Hybrids, I think we caught every species. LMB, Small Mouth Bass, Yellow Perch, Pickerel, Black Crappie, Bluegill, Pumpkinseed.
